Letter 46: Kafka, coffee and Querétaro

“There it goes. This is it. This time it’s war! Imagine its doing this at six forty-five in the morning. They’re getting bigger and stronger and if I don’t do something soon, I will lose the very friends that define the difference between growth and godlessness.” And so I spoke silently to myself. It tried a feint; but a retreat through outflanking, a brilliant move the first dozen times, would not work now: no way, no how. The guerilla tactic continued, almost instinctively.

Creating a disturbance to its left and darting right, I had it, easy. About to relish my personal chorus of victory, by reciting Lieutenant Commander Chekhov of the United Star Ship Enterprise – NCC-1701 – “Got him, Captain Keerk!” Until it stopped dead (soon though it would be itself) in front of me, folding its two top limbs - arms, I suppose - in front of it and focusing its many visions on me. This situation was a first, perhaps in history, certainly in my little piece of it.

No one would ever believe me. Even if I had tried to make this up, people would dismiss it with a smear of contempt saying, “Ned, you can’t make this sh*t up…” What occurred over the next few minutes that morning merits the re-telling even if people think I am a little – even a lot – ‘off’, “Yes, Ned, was a nice boy…and a fairly decent fellow…so sad, really.” But truth is truth, crushing and simple as it is.

“Hey, pal, what are looking at? Okay, okay: I admit I look ugly but you act ugly…” That got me angry, being mocked by some pip-squeak a fraction of my size. But such is the humiliating insult of an insolent insect. It represented at least the third cockroach in as many days to cut right across visual plane in broad lamplight. After a few misses, I had finally nailed the others: crushed like a bug.

What pleasure – what a feeling of victory; what a rush of power! After getting this one, I intended to clean the floor with a toxic concoction so strong, it would roust Rachel Carson out of her nap from here to eternity. But this day, it did not quite work out that way. That damn cockroach was not about to resign ITSELF to its properly ordained fate.

“Me? an IT? you say! Well look at you! You, with your aerosol sprays and that bottle with Spanish text you don’t understand but take comfort in the skull and bones on the label, you Yalie wannabe…fuhcrisake…”

“Hey!” I yelled, “Excuse me!!!”

“Excuse you for what, dinkweed?” replied this nasty little gnat turning sarcastic and imitating me while dancing an Irish jig on its two bottom legs, “Look at me: I’m so cool…I’m a Peace Corps volunteer…well [expletive deleted], you who so nobly laments man’s inhumanity to man. Why can’t hypocrites like you just leave it at that?”

“Leave what at what?” asked I. Damn tough being toyed with by a bug.

“O jeez!” as it rolled all sixteen of its eyes. “You’re duller than I could ever have imagined. some are thicker than others. Why can’t you erectile dysfunctions with your projectiles without compunctions just confine your cruelty to yourselves and leave the rest of the hell alone…?”

By now, I was smoking peeved, “Listen, you filthy little bastard, I won’t stand for this in my living room…”

“Oh, yes, you will…”

“Oh, no I won’t,” said I, adding snittily, “And just tell me why you think I should?”

“Because you don’t own this dump. You rent. Or had you forgotten, Einstein?”

“Einstein! Einstein? Why you, you, you…” I was so unnerved by this bug I could not speak and just foamed at the mouth, my head buzzing like a bee-hive.

“Hah!” he said contemptuously wiggling his antenna in a manner calculated to annoy me. But he continued, “You go through life, smugly assuming that you are just a little better than others, just a little more sensitive, just a little less understood…fuhgetaboutit, fuhcrisake, you prig.”

“I do not have to tolerate this…” I countered.

The cockroach, with doom imminent, continued utterly undeterred, “You will prevail here today. Hope you feel good, killing a defenseless little insect…ooohhhh – you’re such a hard-guy! What with killing us who are a millionth of your size.”

Squinting hard, I glowered, to no effect, as it continued without hesitation, “And, guess what, jerk? I have to live off your scraps and Mister ‘I’m-so-cool-that-I’m-above-culture-shock’ only leaves bits of Kit-Kat bars and potato chips for me to eat! You know something? If your clod-hopper didn’t get me, your diet would…”

“That’s it!” I replied plaintively, trying to paraphrase Emerson to gain the upper hand, “There comes a time-“

But the bug cut me off, “yeah, yeah, where immolation is insecticide…Trust me, your pedantry precedes you, Julian…yeah, that’s right: Julian on the bus…”

Truly humiliated at being called as the one character I feared the most in all the ficition I have read, I said icily, “You germ-laden little louse! That is enough. You are one dead bug, bug…”

“Hey, I know you’re gonna kill me but do you have to insult me by referring to me as one of them?”

Again I was disconcerted, “One of whom?”

The bug quavered slightly – or was it a shrug? – and bawled, “A louse! That’s what! And, hey, look at you, squirm-weenie! You and your mammal-mania…why your actions display a colder blood than I’ve ever had…diddling with Emerson, fuhcrisakes, you philosophical flip-chart…”

At that point, I snapped stomped hard but missed. It looked truly frightened but quickly regained its composure and said, “That’s right. You can’t out-argue a bug. So just crush me…good for your karma…”

Shrugging my shoulders, I retorted, “Karma? How can you talk about karma? You have a life span of two weeks, tops…”

“Huh? More like five days with peaceniks like you around…” It sneered at me, “At least that bounced Czech had more empathy for me than you ever will...”

Being humbled by people is not fun. But to be belittled by a bug? So I reached for the can, resorting to aerosol for the first time in many years. It knew the end was near but it still refused to move. Its sarcasm and critical faculty had bought itself a month in human terms but my patience had dissipated after five minutes.

Nevertheless, it remained composed as I readied the can. Then I remembered reading somewhere that bug spray works like nerve gas. Damn! With compassion and frustration swirling uneasily inside my heart, I decided to make its end quick – a mercy shot with the stomp of my left foot. Enfolding the crushed corpse in single-ply toilet paper – I am roughing it, you know – I flushed it down the toilet.

Then I brushed my teeth, finished dressing, clipped on my Peace Corps pin and headed off to the science center where I serve the United States of America, helping our benighted neighbors to the South. As I locked the door, in a hurry because I was now running late, I remembered a long-forgotten fragment of that signature Kipling ditty learned in grade school:

“You’re a better than I, Gunga Din.” I looked around furtively, saw a neighbor and smiled faintly, “Buenos días, señor. ¿Cómo está usted, esta mañana?”

Letter #45: like 1845 - time for a new war with Mexico

The war on drugs is lost; long live the war. Yes, we need to fight the good fight. Perhaps we could frame our efforts in terms other than war. One word can be enough to harden hearts and close minds. In this phony war on drugs, such chemical casuistry turns what really ought to be a concerted policy to address a national ill into misguided imagery to justify consequences beyond the countenance of civilized men and women. We know the reasoning, “Hey, it’s war: innocents regrettably die.”

Or to be more bluntly traditional, the war on drugs has been anything but a just war. Over forty years of trying to cut demand through mass incarcerations, border patrols, tougher penalties for dealers, drones violating Mexico's sovereignty and government-sanctioned gun-running have not significantly reduced the demand for illegal drugs in the U.S. In fact, the unintended and often unmentioned consequences – the collateral damage of this phony war – re-appear so often and are so consistently damaging that they undermine the intentions of the policy, no matter how fine they once were.

We all know the consequences north of the Rio Grande: the demoralization of millions of young blacks through jail-time for petty crimes; the deaths of others because the current policy so often looks away from the poorer communities riddled with gang warfare and cheap drugs; the absence of support for any but the wealthier addicts sincerely seeking help; as well as, omitted support for suffering families. The suffering in Mexico – some 125,000 dead – categorically trumps any justice in this ‘war’ since the origin of the problem lies squarely in the United States.

Continuation of this war on drugs guarantees more such collateral carnage in Mexico. So the intentions of this war on drugs remain “good”: well that is just wonderful. Such intentions, however, fall utterly to dust in the glare of accountability for the damages imposed upon so many people not involved in the trafficking or use of illegal drugs . The policy itself becomes fundamentally unjust and the predictably fatal fall-out inheres to, and compromises, the righteousness of its premise.

Our highest levels of leadership, in both parties, lack the courage to stand up and out publicly and ask the American people: “What is it about America – the most powerful, richest, greatest society (blah, blah, blah ad blauseam) in history – that so many of her people resort to illegal drugs and excessive alcohol consumption?”. Such a basic and simple question has few in the way of constructive answers.

But without the courage to admit to, and the inward capacity to address, a spiritual illness run rampant, nothing new is tried and no risks are taken: the scourge simply gets worse by default. All of these constraints –harsh consequences, hardened criminals, institutional racism / classism, and absence of courage – beg a comprehensive and easily understood solution like legalization, right?

Well it’s not that easy. Just how would drugs be legalized? It is not hard to suppose that well meaning government entities would impose a minimum “legal using age” and, as a complement, some type of regulated potency for the drugs. In short, the legalization of drugs would almost certainly parallel the restrictions in place for liquor (i.e., minimum age of twenty-one and regulations on quality).

Therein lies a most chafing rub: narcotics distribution channels already reach down age levels as low as children in junior high school. Additionally, with the two or three generations of drug use already entrenched, popular taste may well have inclined to a level of potency far above the one that a responsible government could safely permit. Thus, a sweeping legalization of drugs would create the perverse and unintended effect of getting even stronger drugs funneled down to even younger kids to create a life-long preference for the illicit products available on the black market.

So what would Americans – or, more, likely their leaders – do to face this unanticipated dilemma? Send every kid from the seventh grade or higher to some six-year boot-camp to monitor their every move? Blame the Mexicans and wash their hands of even more narco-sobre-narco killings with innocent caught in the casino fire? Pour pesticides across Colombia so nothing grows, including illiterate natives (i.e., ‘expendable’ people) poisoned by a different kind of toxin? Just do nothing and simply let predominantly less privileged American kids dabble in more and dangerous drugs, succumbing to the pressure of rugged marketers competing in a narrowed domain? How many people might die under a scenario like that?

Legalization only becomes the phony peace to displace an equally phony – and equally failing – war. Yet there is a third way quite possibly out of the dilemma. But first, America needs to ask the question it has avoided for forty years for want of an easy answer. This simple question will arguably be the most difficult part of a new policy. Why? Because the search for an answer to why the American spirit has a gaping and gangrenous hole at its very center will:

• confound the conservatives who focus solely on personal responsibility and not on the structural violence of poverty;
• lead the liberals into areas of personal choices and morality beyond the reach of government intervention aimed at populations, not people;
• stump and short-circuit the mechanistic zeal of the technocrats; as well as,
• bring out in bold relief the current inability to sustain a long-term policy in a hyper-kinetic society buzzing with belligerence.

My opinion is just that, an opinion. First, we change this phony war into a renewed crusade against addiction. Like it or not, spiritual illness is endemic to American society. Who knows why; who cares why. Millions suffer under addiction while other millions suffer in prison. So, from a policy perspective, how do we as a people fill that spiritual void with things other than illegal substances? In my mind, at least, we would announce this crusade by:

1. decriminalizing the consumption of drugs by addicts who turn themselves in to the local Health and Human Services office;
2. rehabilitating addicts, even if the whole state of Alaska has to be set aside as one great big re-hab;
3. teaching minimal jobs skills (besides making license plates) for addicts being rehabilitated;
4. offering tax breaks for those companies hiring recovering addicts;
5. light, misdemeanor sentences for recreational users or addicts not taking advantage of the amnesty program initially or dealers with minimal amounts (intended for friends) with referral to the local re-hab; and,
6. stiff sentences professional dealers that increase if the drugs are significantly stronger than those distributed to addicts or targeted toward people below the age of 18.

Would this solve everything? Of course not. At least we will have resources freed up to educate the poor, support the afflicted and incarcerate the real gangsters: dealers preying on our youngsters. These ideas are worth considering only as part of a larger, though lamentably mute, debate about what we, as a country and as a people, do to change a failing policy that is no longer just. Would México be willing to pitch in? Oh, I can think of more than a hundred thousand reasons why she just might help.

Letter-44: Hey Aaron, you forgot your wheaties

Being a Peace Corps volunteer has in fact been more than it is cracked up to be. Indeed, thirty-five years of dedicated procrastination have paid off in that I have the confidence to contribute to the technology transfer programs of my agency and accomplish more than I did working longer hours while dodging real and bureaucratic bullets in a development agency overseas. Ironically, until a month before my deployment to México, I had a vision of teaching school in a remote hill-town on the Baja Peninsula, meditating at night, writing the great American novel by day and giving Siddhartha a run for his money.

Yet, I arrived in Querétaro, an internationalist city of about a million people, somehow selected for the Technology Transfer Program without the vaguest notion of what tech transfer was or why I should be selected for such a heady program given a rather ‘grey-flannel’ background in banking and government work. But here I was and the last thing I wanted to do was nothing. After all, I had come to México to contribute and, by jingo, I was going to do that.

Realizing within days that my background was quite unlike most others here, if only because I had taken one science course in the last forty years, I deflected daily panic by remembering how Kansas City Athletics infielder, Bert ‘Campy’ Campaneris, pulled of a truly remarkable feat in the Major Leagues in the 1960s by playing a different position in the field – including both positions of the battery – in each of nine innings. If Campy could pull that off in the Major Leagues, well than a classic ‘jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none’ like me might do something here in México as well.

What has made this tour profoundly maturing for me as a merry misfit are two things: the support of the Peace Corps, particularly in language training and some orientation on technology transfer, as well as the openness consistently exhibited by my host country agency, El Centro de Ingeniería y Desarrollo Industrial (CIDESI). Additionally, I cannot fail to credit two other Peace Corps types at CIDESI – Miss Daisie Hobson of Arizona and Mr Gerald Meyer of Utah – who have empowered me in matters technical and shown me the way to goodwill.

After three months of grueling – but excellent – language training in the Peace Corps, I landed in CIDESI for a project that did not start moving forward until seven months later. So I read and read…and read…would get a piece of raw meat just in the nick of time…and read some more. Eventually, I would cull the 50-60% of the material not relevant to CIDESI of a Mexican government accounting manual to be applied in implementing a new system of book-keeping imposed all governance entities, agencies and state-owned enterprises at all levels in the Mexican government.

In short, I had willingly signed up for the grunt work of the project. Again, this challenge proved to be one of perspective. Three thoughts reassured and reconciled me to that sought after servitude. First, the busy-work would keep me engaged, knowing that I would come to understand fiscal economics and accounting in México as few other Yanks. Second, not only were my colleagues already over-burdened with the normal grind of finance but also had to cope with an institution writhing its way through a radical restructuring of the organization and re-shaping of its culture.

Third, in finance, one simply has to do the crud-work, do it well and display a willingness to do it to earn professional credibility. In that respect, at least, Querétaro is no different than Canary Wharf and CIDESI is identical to Citicorp. Reading several thousand pages in Spanish of regulations, laws, accounting standards and the like kept me busy for four months. Nevertheless, glutted with my intellectual Wheaties, soon I yearned for more; that is, to do more, to contribute more and, most of all, to learn more.

So, with the encouragement of CIDESI acquaintances outside of my department – together with the kind support of my finance colleagues – on my spare time, I prepared a vision of tech transfer and how it might work at CIDESI. To accomplish this rather herculean task, way outside the realm of my experience and pushing the parameters of my project plan, I got a reading list of eight books, primarily from a mechanical engineer at CIDESI who is the in-house visionary. More than anything, however, I took the cotton out of my ears and put it in my mouth and listened…a lot.

All of these things, again with thousands of pages of preparatory studies force-fed mainly at night and on week-ends, enabled me to put together a decent ‘first-stab’ vision expressed in a slide-show. The senior engineers graciously invited me – a French Literature and ‘Politics’ major – to join their efforts. Their invitation was allegedly based on that slide-show, my rudimentary command of Spanish (a/k/a, lisp and giggle) and my “mente hiperactiva” (i.e., right-brained, at worst entertaining, enthusiasm). The five words I have repeated over-and-over, for I can not pretend to be a jock at this stuff, are “solamente primas materias para refinarse”.

Since then, I have held intensive meetings the line Directors of the major research areas to solicit their respective visions; developed two technology road-maps; written ‘off-white’ papers analyzing risk management and financial oversight of projects; as well as, participated in presentations to, or speeches by, senior agency officials. Soon, very cold-sweat soon, I will suggesting ways of integrating financial concepts into project management be led very well by Daisie Hobson.

CIDESI has really stepped up its support for me with four months of daily Spanish training, attendance at a national accounting forum, and three outside courses / conferences on tech transfer, accounting standards and communications skills. Once again, my fellow Peace Corps volunteers, both trained engineers, have been critical in my effort to discipline whizzing thoughts, divergent ideas and dancing pages into some decent ideas.

These contributions, together with my open encouragement for others to take what I produce and make it so much better, have proven to be instrumental to being invited to more interesting tasks. Just as I wash the dishes after my ‘novia’ makes dinner for me, however, I never want to let go of crud-work entirely because, after all, I am a Peace Corps volunteer and helpfulness remains the name of the game, at least as long as the cotton remains out of my ears and in my mouth.

#43: Community Service, the Filarmónica and Spreadsheets

One of the missions we fulfill in the Peace Corps is that of community service through secondary projects. “Community Service” implies basically the same concept to most people – hands-on volunteer work to assist others less advantaged than we. This inference, drawn repeatedly, becomes an expectation articulated as an ideal. Nevertheless, any externally based referent creates just another sustaining illusion to enable us to matter, if only to ourselves.

People pay a heavy price for doing this since these illusions often define their futures, deaden their pasts and deflect the presents. Recently, I listened to the Orquesta Filarmónica de Querétaro perform Ernest Bloch’s hypnotizing rhapsody of Solomon and meditated on the life of that savvy sovereign. He understood something from his cradle: more often than not, for me at least, wisdom entails the removal of distractions rather than requires a flash of insight. This gift to me was welcome in face of a recent summons to present on my project in “Community Service” to the new SEMARNAT Aspirantes.

That peremptory notice made the private language of “Community Service” dreadfully relevant to me as a man who is simply not a real hands-on guy, who is downright shy. Few are those who can say that they do not want to perform a “Community Service”. Like any group, there is something of a consensus here in Peace Corps / Querétaro of what Community Service is. Until Bloch’s work snapped me out of my fuzzy guilt, I had felt like I was coming up short in the ‘Corps’.

Yet the persistence of this uneasy feeling of not meeting others' standards begged the question of what exactly the Peace Corps meant to me. Finally, I was no longer asking the wrong question of why I would not conform to a consensus I had not really endorsed. My past lost its currency while the future merely was tomorrow. So now I could think about the right concern: what is “Community Service” for me? A quick inventory of my activities reveals that all of my present work –- four projects, three more than required -- flows through the same small national science center in which I am serving.

Four projects, that is. The three taken on at my own initiative built up gradually after my first by-the-book “Community Service” did not last very long. Next, I had lined up dutifully to work with a business incubator at a local University. That never materialized. And so I began to collaborate with a fellow in my center who wants to learn English but who is tinkering around with a new invention, a patented health care device. The Filarmónica quickly deepened my contemplative mood with the sublime Symphony #2 by Rachmaninov.

That is when the veil of those language games imposed by others’ values silently slipped away. For the first time, I realized my unromantic, hardly heroic, work of preparing financial forecasts and other elements of due-diligence to commercialize that invention actually serves the larger good. True, I would not be teaching grateful children, beaming at a camera while it clicked away. Equally true, however, is that my time and skill is granted, free of charge. Yet the numbers become compelling, at least to me: up to a thousand new jobs to be created across Mexico; up to a hundred thousand lives saved per year etc.

God then muttered in my ear through his long-dead go-between, Sergei Rachmaninov, “Son, let others teach and hammer the nails. Your mission is to enable people to earn the money that buys the books that your Peace Corps compatriots are teaching them so mightily to read. What’s more, you are letting one in seven people in Mexico live long enough to the savour the literature they purchase.”

The 12th & 13th of September 2001.

Flights were grounded; military jets patrolled the breach. So, my sister and I drove East in our 'AVIS'. The rental companies had graciously permitted people to use their cars for long-distance one-way drop-offs in lieu of cancelled flights. We headed to Pittsburgh to spend the night at my Aunt Katie´s and Uncle Tucker’s house. The talk was of shock, anger and mystification of how and why these brutal attacks had taken place.

What had America done to deserve this savagery?
That question still haunts me today, ten years later, here in México.

The common feelings amongst us, beyond proper articulation, remained so paramount that the talk was filler to avoid rudeness at the dinner table. The next day, I drove my sister back to the Baltimore-Washington (Thurgood Marshall) International Airport, where she had left her car a couple of days before to fly out to Uncle Henry’s funeral. I dropped the car off at the AVIS lot.

At least, I could catch the next Amtrak to the City. On that routine ride up the coast, I read newspaper accounts of 'nine-eleven'. Some loud-mouthed woman yapped for much of the trip about how she was not about to be intimidated by “towel-heads” and other such non-sense, which (of course) I was thinking, too, but loath toward admitting.

Since she was attractive some men indulged and enabled her in holding court. Sobering was the realization that, had she not been young and attractive, she would likely have been shouted down by the rest of us, equally fearful as she. Life changes, not people.

As the train exited Newark, New Jersey and headed toward Penn station in mid-town Manhattan, I removed my nose from the newspaper at about the right time to focus on the traditional landmarks telling me I would be home soon.

Alas, the train must have been going slower or my timing was off; probably the latter as I felt very tired. In any case, I could not spot the twin towers anywhere in my visual range. Instead some factory was emitting large amounts of smoke.

What the devil? I had been on this route perhaps twenty times and could not recall that much smoke billowing out of a factory. I wondered, “This just doesn’t seem right and where are those damn towers, anyways?”

My heart freeze-dried. The train was not slowing down at all and my timing had been just fine. That smoke is – or WAS – the World Trade Center. The pain returned. We entered the Lincoln Tunnel for the home-stretch for Penn Station. As the mouth of the tunnel yawned before us, I noticed a welcome silence. The all-American magpie was quiet, her knuckles wrapped on the handle (used to help one get up from the seat) on the seat in front of her. Those joints remained white as American Standard porcelain.

Only then did I realize my previous exasperation with her lay more in my tendency to blame others for my unease than in her neurotic coquetry. The metro-liner entered the tunnel. The fear I had tried to keep away from me surfaced briefly. I said inwardly, “God, here's the deal: if now is my time to die, make it quick..." And I pushed the thought away; I do not fear being dead but dying scares me to...

Penn Station may have been crowded or it may not have been – I was oblivious. As I walked across town to my apartment, I heard many sirens. The City was different. I felt like George Bailey in “It’s a Wonderful Life” when he returns to ‘Pottersville’ after being granted his wish never to have lived at all.

That feeling lifted quickly as the famous resilience and under-rated friendliness of New Yorkers shone through that twilight: an unrehearsed nobility evinced by my favorite people in my favorite place on the Earth. I was home. What still clings with me now, however, was the smell – one that took a week or more to dissipate. It crawled inside my nostrils.

At that time, with my penchant for exaggeration, I assumed that within those mixed odors of burned concrete, steel, plaster-board, asbestos, etc. was also that of incinerated flesh. That was almost certainly not the case, but the trenchant odor reminded me of the carnage that had just hit my city, New York City.

When I arrived to my apartment building, the doorman and I simply looked down in grief. My practice was to chat things up with these friendly professionals about recent events. One had tipped me off that Vice President Gore might lose the 2000 election; this man disliked the Democrat due to his towering over President Bush, trying to intimidate the Republican, in the second televised debate. This time, however, what was there to say?

After shedding my suit-case, I donned my running clothes and jogged to a few hospitals to contribute blood: “brother, can you spare a pint?” After the third and last hospital that I tried without success, I gave up. My fellow New Yorkers had rallied to the call overwhelmingly. Good for them. Sadly, however, few were injured since most had been incinerated on the eleventh. As I turned to jog back to my apartment, a woman reporter from Fox News and her cameraman approached me and asked to interview me.

Why not?

By then, it was very clear that a gang of young Arabs had perpetrated this mass-murder. The reporter asked me what I felt about the attack. Of course, I opened by saying I was disheartened by the event but had gained some strength from the response of my fellow New Yorkers. All right on schedule for the reporter.

Then I said, “I hope we can remember than many Muslims died that day, too…” Instantly her plastic smile morphed into open hatred. I thought to myself, “what a bigoted bimbo” and scat from her as quickly as she from me.

Only days later would it occur to me that she had likely thought I was expressing sympathy for the nineteen suicidal sociopaths when, in fact, I was thinking of the Bangladeshis and other Muslims working hard in the Trade Center, particularly in the top-floor restaurant, to give their children some of the opportunities denied to them. All were condemned to death simply for going to work on that day of ignominy.

Last time I checked, Muslim children cry, too.

The 11th of September 2001

“Dammit, Edward, you’re forty-four f*cking years old," I chastised myself, "and you are worried about the goddam stupid knot in your neck-tie on the day you bury your god-father? Hey, pal, just grow up and go, already!” It was not an average morning. Normally, I would be walking up the Avenue of the Americas toward West Fifty-second Street and work.

No, this sunny Tuesday morning found me in Michigan, ready to attend the funeral of my Uncle Henry. In fact, at nine in the morning, the only element in common with my life in New York was that I was running late. As I strode past the reception area toward the hotel restaurant for breakfast, the Iraqi-American behind the desk, a very friendly acquaintance of five days running, said excitedly in a high-pitched voice, “A plane crashed into a building in New York!”

Too busy rehearsing an excuse for being late yet again for something important, I did not bother to break stride, figuring this nice man’s grim news was inaccurate – after all English was not his first language – or that it was something like the little plane that had smacked into the side of a hotel in Milan some time before.

As I escorted my sister through the lobby at about nine-thirty, the same gentleman, almost laughing it seemed to me, announced again in a high-pitched voice, “A large-jet has hit the other tower of the World Trade Center…” Now I realized, he was telling the truth. “Military?” I asked. “I don’t know, sir…” All these years later, I still wonder why that polite man was so out of step with the terrible tidings he was delivering.

Was he giggling because he had begun to connect the dots? Terrorism. That means it could be Middle Easterners. That means what happened in Iraq ten years ago could happen all over again, this time killing a lot more than the tens of thousands of civilians annihilated by Desert Storm. Thinking about it now, I can well understand the squeaky voice, the oddity of sideways laughter. That decent man was probably a harrowed witness of the past and scared witless for the future, as would I have been had I been an Iraqi-American living in Dearborn.

This was no accident. Nevertheless, we had to get to the funeral. During the fifteen minute drive to the church, my sister found a radio station reporting the “incident” in New York and the details of spontaneous crematoria began to focus themselves. We got to church about five minutes before the start of the ten o’clock service. My cousin Peter said, “One of the towers is listing heavily…You know what dad would be saying right now…” The priest intoned a spontaneous intention to prayer: “To the people of New York this morning.”

After the interment, we spent the day at Aunt Marion’s house just watching the television. About the only activity, outside of eating lunch, were my sister and my Aunt’s sister making frantic phone calls to see if everybody was okay. Betty Hilton, Marion McDonnell’s normally plucky sister, would spend the rest of that day in the Hell of not knowing what had happened to her son. He worked in or adjacent to the World Trade Center. A blessed e-mail came in from Westchester County later that evening; all her family was fine. The terror had worked its black magic.

People in Annapolis, where my sister lives, had heard that the Naval Academy was the target of the plane that had went missing in Pennsylvania and found as the detritus of death near some hick-town, Shanksville. Lifelong friends in Pittsburgh would later tell me how people had fled from U.S. Steel headquarters, the tallest building in town and the "probable target" of that mystery flight. Other friends in Chicago were convinced that the Sears Tower was in that unknown flight’s cross-hairs.

While these suppositions contain varying degrees of the incredible, who can blame these people for feeling this way? No one knew the location or the direction of intent of this missile of mass-murder. That not-knowing was the crux of the terror. Especially since the second mass murder in New York was replayed endlessly, often in slow motion. I remember watching that plane turning straight toward the tower to collide into it. My breath took a breather at that moment: witnessing unvarnished evil has that effect, I suppose.

On international television, innocents leapt from a thousand feet above the ground. Like a stupid ass, I thought 'compassionately', “Well, I would do the same thing if faced with the certainty of burning to death. I'd just get it over-with…” A dust storm in the City? No way. The towers were falling. Back came a very disturbing conversation some six or seven years before with one of the foremost material engineers in the East about the first bombing of the Trade Center.

That Ph.D. took the time during my family's annual Christmas party to explain to me in detail how dangerously close the blind sheik’s gangsters had come to compromising the structural integrity of the World Trade Center to tip it over in 1993. That kindly scientist, who had reviewed that bombing as an industrial ceramics expert, said that somebody had known his engineering.

With a relief removed from reality, I thanked God that the towers fell the way they did; at least they had stood long enough for most people to get out. Had they tipped, so many more would have died that day. We all watched the President state with a determination to reassure his shaken nation something to the effect, “Today was a not an act of terrorism, it was an act of war.”

Further, we felt gratitude of seeing American courage making a come-back when a politician whom I did not like, Mayor Giuliani, walked into the smoking wreckage, handkerchief over his mouth and nose. Greatness was certainly thrust upon the Mayor that hour and, as time would show, upon the President.

While I had missed Mom and Dad mightily, I was almost grateful they had not lived to see that day, the eleventh of September 2001. Time to get back to New York, now…

The Tenth of September 2001

Please note a few changes in red-font, integrated after writing this essay to reflect information received subsequently. Links are in blue-bold font.

Things had been busy for the preceding couple of days, picking up my sister and a cousine at the Detroit-Metro Airport as well as getting ready for the funeral of my Uncle Henry McDonnell the next morning. I had been in Detroit for a few days because I visited my uncle at the very end of his life to thank him for being a good uncle and attentive god-father and to say good-bye. Of course, and again, I would show up in my father’s stead; this time for his beloved brother.

The pace of preparation had finally slowed during the visitation at a local funeral home. Toward the end of the evening, I took a few moments for myself to look at the photo portrait of my Aunt Marion and Uncle Henry on their wedding day. Since a decade has elapsed, the timing of events have scrambled from memory to meaning, from sequence to significance. They looked young, lovely, expectant – my Aunt Kit and Uncle Hank did.

Years later, I would watch a scene in the movie “Letters from Iwo Jima” with Sam, the mortally wounded United States Marine, speaking with the Japanese Colonel who was comforting him with the last of the morphine available. Sam asked that officer, “Are you somebody famous?” 

Within three years, I would spend several hours in the combat hospital in Baghdad, Iraq, watching over another young United States Marine – Lance Corporal Langley – as he slowly slipped away from doctors who had tried everything to assure this boy a full life. The infantry squad whom that young man had saved single-handedly, with singular virtue and sacrifice, were hurting. Theirs was not yet the glory of combat in that room but the very human mixture of guilt, gratitude and grief.

Indeed, Sam’s wonderment in that cave in 1944 haunted me now six years before the Eastwood film flashed across the screens. You see, Hank McDonnell was much like Sam. He had learned to do the right thing – and he did so by joining the United States Army as a sergeant, fresh out of college. The differences were two. Hank McDonnell survived and he was gunned down on the beach, not of Iwo Jima, but of Okinawa, during that very bloody Spring of fifty-six years before 2001.

Hank’s squad had not made much headway when he watched the head of his radio-man shatter just feet away from him under enemy fire. Hank was soon to follow, striking the ground with at least one bullet inside him. He was probably dying and he could not move. For hours he lay there, exposed. For hours, he heard the dull thuds of bullets hitting the soil around him. Hank prayed and through the battle-field courage and medical know-how of others, he lived.

Such bravery, perhaps inborn or perhaps the grace of the moment, set Hank McDonnell above most and apart from almost everybody. My Uncle Henry took that image of a friend severed savagely, of waiting for his turn to die, with him for the rest of his life. Dancing as they do, my memories quickly shifted ahead to the quiet celebration of Henry McDonnell's eightieth birthday in Tucson, where I showed up in the stead of my father.

My birthday gift for this occasion was a thin envelope, much like the one containing the rejection letter Hank had received from Yale when he was graduating from Andover; I suffered the same tritely teen-age agony four decades later at Choate. An envelope? And a thin one? Not much. But Henry McDonnell had earned everything I could afford to buy that he might value.

After a low-key dinner with Aunt Marion, my cousin Peter, and his truly magnificent wife, Paula, I gave my gift and held my breath, anxious to make the right impression. Uncle Henry opened the envelope perhaps annoyed that I had lamely given him $80 for eighty years. He read the form-letter from one of my heroes, then recently retired Senator Robert Dole, thanking me for a $100 contribution -- in the honor of Henry Egglesoe McDonnell, Jr -- to the World War II Memorial under construction in Washington, D.C.

Hank McDonnell welcomed that gift: I had made my father proud. Two months later, at a much larger family reunion to celebrate Uncle Henry’s birthday, I happened to be alone, walking out of the powder room, when Hank McDonnell, as close to crying as the night he said good-bye to his ‘kid’ brother, just hours before my father departed, said, in what sounded to me like a stern tone, “Ned, come here.”

Anxious as always and more than a little insecure, I watched my uncle reach into a drawer and take out a leather-bound box, the type that has the royal blue velvet lining, usually containing jewelry. Opening that box, Hank McDonnell showed me his medals: a bronze star and a purple heart and one other I did not recognize. His words were barely audible, “I have hardly ever shown these, Ned, but I wanted you to see them.”

The announcement of the brother of my Aunt Marion, an Episcopal priest of many years in South Carolina, that he would lead a time of prayer to honour my uncle, snapped me out of that momentary reverie. That an Episcopal priest – my Aunt’s brother – would exhibit the grace to salute Henry McDonnell by leading a prayer made me realize that Hank had been very fortunate. The wealth he had married into turned out to be as real as it had been apparent.
After the prayers, my sister and I were walking out of the visitation room to return to our hotel, since the emotion of the past days had left me tired. My cousine, Nancy McDonnell, who had – like her father – succeeded in business and, much again like Hank, understood the importance of a personal reserve, stood near the entrance, briefly alone. My intention had been to offer her a ride to the airport after the funeral, hoping that she would somehow decide for me whether I would head back to Manhattan tomorrow, the eleventh, or wait until the twelfth.

Instead, she stood there, her eyes deep in a daughter’s grief. Notwithstanding my stupid Charlie-Brown look of not having the words to say what I should be saying, Nancy McDonnell looked at me, winced in shaking her head subtly, and said,

“You know, Ned, it’s the end of an era…”